On Literary Evolution: An Interview with Stéphane Mallarmé
Stéphane Mallarmé’s Responses to the Inquiries of Jules Huret, Spring 1891
Translated from the French by Cid Corman
Mr. Stéphane Mallarmé — One of the most generally beloved writers in the world of letters with Catulle Mendès. Medium height, graying beard, trimmed to a point, a large straight nose, ears long and pointed like a satyr, eyes wide open shining with extraordinary force, a singular expression of keenness tempered by an air of good grace. When he speaks, gesture always accompanies the words, a measured gesture, graceful, precise, eloquent; his voice tends to drag a little at the ends of words gradually softening: the man gives off a certain potent charm, in which one divines an unwithering pride, soaring over all, the pride of a god or of a visionary, before which one must at once within oneself bow down, when one has understood it.
“We are present, at this moment, he told me, at a truly extraordinary and unique spectacle in all the history of poetry: each poet retiring to his corner to play upon a flute, properly his, the tunes that please him: for the first time, since the beginning, poets no longer sing at the music stand. Heretofore it was necessary, wasn’t it, to be accompanied by the great organ of the official metre. Well! They played with it too much and are weary of it. In dying, great Hugo, I’m quite sure, was convinced that all poetry for a century was buried with him; and yet, Paul Verlaine had already written Sagesse: one may pardon such an illusion in one who has accomplished so many miracles, but he reckoned without the eternal instinct, the perpetual and ineluctable lyric impulse. Above all, this indubitable idea was lacking: that, in a society that is unstable and un-unified, no stable art, no definitive art, can be created. Out of this unachieved social order, which explains at the same time the spiritual restlessness, is born the unexplained need of individuality whose present literary manifestations are the direct reflection.
More immediately, what explains recent innovations is that it has been realized that the ancient form of verse was not absolute form, was not unique and immovable, but a way of reliably making good verse. One says to children: “Don’t steal, be honest.” It’s true, but that isn’t all; beyond the consecrated percepts, is it possible to make poetry? Some have thought so and I think they were right. Verse is everywhere in language where there is rhythm, everywhere, except in posters and business news. In what is called “prose,” there is poetry, often admirable, of countless rhythms. But, in truth, there is no prose: there is the alphabet and then verse more or less strictly managed: more or less diffuse. Whenever there is an attempt at style, there is versification.
I said a moment ago that, if you turn to present-day poetry, it is especially noticeable that people are tired of the official formulas; even their protagonists share this lassitude. Isn’t it something quite abnormal to open any book of poetry whatever and to be sure to find from one to the other uniform and conventional rhythms where we are made to expect, on the contrary, to find ourselves amidst the essential variety of human sentiments! Where is the inspiration, where is the unexpected, and what fatigue! Standard verse may only serve in moments of spiritual breakdown; poets today have quite understood this; with a feeling of very delicate reserve, they have wandered about, have approached it with a singular timidity, one would say that some fear and, instead of making of it their principle and point of departure, suddenly brought it up as the crowning of the poem or of the period!
In addition, in music, the same transformation has been produced: to melodies formerly so wrought succeeds an infinity of broken melodies which enrich the fabric without one’s feeling the cadence so strongly marked.
Is it actually here, I asked, that the break has come?
Yes, indeed. The Parnassians, fond of very strict verse, fine by itself, didn’t see that that was only an effort finishing off their own: an effort which had at the same time the advantage of creating a sort of interregnum of great constricted poetry, which demanded grace. For you must know that the attempts of the most recent do not tend to suppress the classic line; they tend rather to let more air into the poem, to create a sort of fluidity, of mobility between the lines of classic flow, which was somewhat lacking up to now. Now suddenly you hear in orchestras the very beautiful bursts of the brasses; but you feel very soon that if there were only that you would get tired of it quickly. The young space out these bold strokes so as to have them appear only at that moment when they are to produce their maximal effect: so it is that the alexandrine, which no one invented and which leapt forth of itself from the instrument of language, instead of remaining fanatical and sedentary as at present, will henceforth be freer, more unexpected, more aerated: it will take on value from being used only in the solemn expressions of the spirit. And the volume of future poetry will be that through which will run the great opening line with an infinity of motifs borrowed from individual hearing.
Thus there is a break through unconsciousness on one side or another that these efforts can reunite rather than destroy each other. For if, on the one hand, the Parnassians have been, in effect, the absolute servants of poetry, even sacrificing their responsibilities to it, the young people have taken their cue directly from music, as if there had been nothing heretofore; but they are only opening up the stiffening, the Parnassian construction work, and, to my mind, the two efforts can complement each other.
These opinions don’t prevent me from believing personally that with the marvelous science of poetry, the supreme art of the caesurae that masters like Banville possessed, the alexandrine can arrive at an infinite variety, can follow all the movements of possible passion; the Forgeron of Banville, for example, has interminable alexandrines, while others, on the contrary, are of an incredible conciseness.
Only our most perfect instrument, which has perhaps been overused, may benefit from resting a little now.
Paul Cézanne, The Garden at Les Lauves, 1906. Oil on canvas. Phillips Collection.
So much for the form, I said to Mr. Mallarmé. What about the content?
I believe, he replied, that in regard to content, the young are nearer the poetic ideal than the Parnassians who still treat their subjects in the manner of the old philosophers and rhetoricians, by presenting things directly. I think that we should, on the contrary, work only through allusion. The contemplation of objects, the image taking wing from the ideas excited by them, are the song: the Parnassians take the thing entirely and display it: in this they lose the mystery; they take away from the spirit the delightful joy of believing that they are creating. To name an object is to suppress three-quarters of the enjoyment of the poem which is done by divining little by little: to suggest it, this is the dream. It is perfect use of this mystery that constitutes the symbol: to evoke bit by bit an object so as to show a state of mind or, inversely, to choose an object and to draw out of it a state of mind, through a sequence of decipherings.
Where we come to, I said to the master, one big objection that I have to make to you… Obscurity!
It is, indeed, equally dangerous, he replied, whether the obscurity comes from the reader’s inadequacy or the poet’s… but it is cheating to evade this task. So if a person of ordinary intelligence, but of inadequate literary background, opens by chance a book so made and pretends to enjoy it, there is a misunderstanding, you have to keep things in their places. There must always be something of the enigma in poetry, it is the aim of poetry – there is no other – to evoke objects.
Is it you, master, I asked, who created the new movement?
I abominate schools, he said, and anything that resembles one: I loathe all that is professional applied to literature which is, on the contrary, utterly individual. For me the case of a poet, in this society which does not permit him to live, is the case of a man who isolates himself in order to carve out his own tomb. What has given me the appearance of being the leader of a school is, first of all, that I have always been interested in the ideas of young people; and then, no doubt, in all sincerity I must acknowledge what the most recent comers have newly contributed. For, at bottom, I am a solitary soul, I believe that poetry is made for the display and supreme rites of a constituted society where that glory which people seem to have lost any sense of would have its place. The attitude of the poet in a time like this, where he is on strike against society, is to stand apart from all the vitiated means which may be offered to him. All that can be proposed to him is inferior to his conception and to his secret task.
Paul Cézanne, Study of a Tree, 1885–90. Watercolor on paper. ArtForum.
I asked M. Mallarmé where he thought Verlaine stood in the history of poetic development.
He was the first to have reacted against the impeccability and impassivity of the Parnassians; he contributed, in Sagesse, his fluid verse with, already, deliberate dissonances. Later, towards 1875, my Après-midi d’un faune, apart from some friends like Mendès, Dierx, and Cladel, made all Parnassus roar, and the piece was refused by the whole group. I tried there, in fact, to put, beside the alexandrine in all its range, a sort of running pianolike play around what might be called a musical accompaniment made by the poet himself and permitting the classic line to appear only on special occasions. But the father, the true father of all the young, is Verlaine, magnificent Verlaine whose bearing as a man was really as beautiful as that as a writer, because he alone, at a time when the poet is beyond the law, took on all the pains with so much dignity and such marvelous pluck.
What do you think of the end of naturalism?
The childishness of literature up to now has been to believe, for example, that to choose a certain number of precious stones and put their names on paper, even the finest, was to make precious stones. Well! No! Poetry, to be created, must be taken into the human soul from states, from glimmers of so absolute a purity that, finely sung and finely set in light, it constitutes indeed man’s jewelry: there there is the symbol, there the creation, and the word poetry takes on its meaning: it is, in sum, the sole possible human creation. And if, truly, precious stones that we adorn ourselves with do not manifest a spiritual state it is that they are improperly assumed… Woman, for example, that eternal thief…
But hold on, added my interlocutor half laughing, what is admirable in novelty shops is sometimes to have revealed to us, by the chief of police, that his wife was improperly dressed without her knowing the hidden meaning of it and consequently it doesn’t relate to her…
To get back to naturalism, it seems to me that you must be referring to the work of Émile Zola and that the word will die indeed when his work is done. I have great admiration for Zola. He has, frankly, made not so much real literature as evocative art, using, as little as possible, literary elements; he has taken words, it is true, but that’s all: the rest proceeds from his marvelous organization and reechoes immediately in the mind of the crowd. He has truly powerful qualities; his unexampled sense of life, his sense of crowds, the skin of Nana, whose texture we have all caressed, all that painted in with admirable organization! But literature is somewhat more intellectual than that: things exist, we haven’t created them; we have only to grasp their relations; and it is the threads of these relations that form poems and orchestras.
Édouard Manet, Nana, 1877. Oil on canvas.
Do you know the psychologists?
A little. It seems to me that after the great works of Flaubert, of the Goncourts, and of Zola, which are poems of sorts, we have returned to the old French taste today of the last century, much more humble and modest, which consists not of turning to painting one’s means to show the exterior form of things, but to dissect the motives of the human spirit. But there is, between this and poetry, the same difference that there is between a bodice and a lovely throat…
I asked M. Mallarmé, before leaving, the names of those who represent, according to him, the current poetic push.
The young people, he said, who seem to me to have done work of mastery, that is – original work, owing nothing to what went before, are Morice, Moréas, a delightful singer and, above all, one who has given till now the strongest shove, Henri de Régnier, who, like de Vigny, lives away off, in retreat and silence, and before whom I bow in admiration. His last book, Poèmes anciens et romanesques, is a pure masterpiece.
At bottom, you see, the master said while shaking my hand, the world is made to end with a beautiful book.
Odilon Redon, The Book of Light, 1893. Charcoal on paper.
Cid Corman (1924-2004), poet, editor, and translator, was born in Boston. He received his bachelor’s degree from Tufts University and masters at the University of Michigan. In 1951, he founded Origin, a poetry magazine that published Robert Creeley, Denise Levertov, and Louis Zukofsky, among many others. He studied for awhile at the Sorbonne, moved to a small town in Italy to teach English, and then to Japan, where met and married Konishi Shizumi. He passed away in 2004 in Kyoto.